Latest / Scalability School / Whitelisting: Turning Non-brand Pages Into Your ROAS Engine

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Whitelisting: Turning Non-brand Pages Into Your ROAS Engine · Scalability School

• Andrew Foxwell (00:01.249) All righty, all righty, all righty. Andrew Foxwell (00:06.575) All right, welcome to episode six of the Scalability School podcast, talking all about whitelisting today. Who is stoked, anybody? I am. I mean, this is the new creative diversity, right? This is it, this is where it lives. Zach Stuck (00:14.869) Hahaha. Brad (00:15.246) Hehehehe It is. Yes, it is. Andrew Foxwell (00:21.913) Yeah, so let's go ahead and just jump right into it about whitelisting. So what is whitelisting? I mean, I think we all know, why does it matter? What is this? And why should people pay attention to this? Brad? Brad (00:34.22) Yeah, I'll kick it off. I have extreme examples of where whitelisting has worked extremely well and where it's not worked at all. And I think that ultimately it's worth testing for the upside because you can control the downside. so whitelisting in short is basically running ads from a page that is not your brand page. Like that is a simple version of it. I can send, Zach could send me socks and I could create ads for him as me and we could run ads from Brad Pluck's business page, which I have by the way. I have very high rates. you know, consider that. And we can run ads from my page and it looks like me in partnership with the brand or not in partnership with the brand and we can get into the nuances of it, but it's essentially running ads from a page that is not your brand page. And yeah, that's the simple version of it. Do want to my extreme examples before we dig in deeper? Zach Stuck (01:22.773) I mean, we might as well. Andrew Foxwell (01:22.819) Yes, everybody wants to. Brad (01:25.382) Okay, okay. the simplest version, I think people, we've actually, now that we're recording this, we actually have some episodes live and we've been getting some feedback and people seem to really like the quick tactics video, the very first one. So that's cool. So here's a quick one. We have a brand that we work with. We took a piece of creative. So the question I've had for a long time around whitelisting is, is it the creative that actually makes a difference when you do the whitelisting? Which of course the answer is yes, like creative matters. Or is it the page? Or is it some combination of both? So a very simple way to test this is take an existing piece of creative that you have running from a brand page and duplicate it to like an unaffiliated page that is named something similar. So I don't know. We always use hollow as an example because Zach's decked out in gear right now. know, I don't know. Men go hiking. I don't know. I'm just riffing off top of my head here. It's like duplicate the piece of creative run from the men go hiking page if that's what the creative is talking about. So we did something like this. And over the time period of doing this, I just went back and grabbed a screenshot. So for my reference. Zach Stuck (02:11.827) Yeah. Brad (02:23.182) That same piece of creative, like 5X didn't spend on the whitelisted page, literally no other changes. That's like an extreme example of where the whitelisting page was not the rampage, similar kind of like vibes, but positioned more as like a specific subgroup of the people that buy the product and went extremely well. On the opposite spectrum, this one's way quicker, we've had clients work with like... I say this delicately, like washed up celebrities basically is the way to position it. it's like click through rates are through the roof and you're like, wow, this is going to be sick. It's just like conversion rates are horrible. It's like the reason people are clicking the ad is because it's the person they have. They don't care about the product at all. And it's gone horribly for those same reasons. Even when it's like, okay, it's an athlete and this product makes sense for like the person using it. Zach Stuck (02:52.479) Yeah. Brad (03:12.462) I don't know how you control for that ahead of time, but those are my extreme examples. The upside example where you can really quickly change the page. Super exciting. I think that makes it worth doing. Hello. Andrew Foxwell (03:19.823) I think we can definitely talk about washed up celebrities. Like some of them might be in our hundreds of listens, tens of listens that we have on this podcast. So thank you. So yeah, I mean, I agree. Like it is actually, it's more important than you think a lot of times if you're working with a creator and white listing, like to who you're gonna be partnering with, right? I've made the same mistake of thinking that we got somebody for cheap and it didn't go the way that we thought it was gonna go. So a hundred percent understand. Zach Stuck (03:25.358) Yeah. Brad (03:25.87) You Yes. Andrew Foxwell (03:48.855) So the options for running these are just like brand page, the creator page, a non-branded, so like an editorial meme style problem solution storytelling type thing, and then a partnership versus non-partnership. Which of these has worked the best in your opinion, that you guys have done? Because I know you've done a lot of experimenting too with the editorial meme style stuff, or like advertorial type pieces. Zach Stuck (04:17.001) Yeah, I mean, for us, the advertorial stuff works primarily if like the buyers are women more than men. So we found that, and again, this is just like based on a lot of spend, know, hundreds of millions of spend across Homestead clients, our own brands now that we've run a lot of traffic. I've talked to Ryan Doni about this, like a lot of ad spend has proven this that if it's a male demo, usually like they're going to want shorter copy. So usually these like advertorial things don't work as well or like a you know, hunt for men page to a hunt for men advertorial or something like that, right? Doesn't work as well as like what we do, for example, is we there are founder ads that I've shot where we run ads as Zach from hollow. And that currently is our third highest spending page that we run ads through for the brand. So one, one other just like super quick hack for everyone that doesn't know how to do this, but when you're looking up ads in ads library, if you just search the brand name and you click on the brand, you actually will not see any of these white listed ads. The hack is actually just typing in the name of the brand and hitting enter, not clicking on the brand page. And by typing the name and just hitting enter, you will start to see ads that use that phrase or that brand name in them. know, again, we can use hollows and example, like don't go steal all my like white listing partners, but. Yeah, you could, you could search hollow and you're going to see a bunch of random ads that have the word hollow in it from like skincare brands and whatever. But then you're also going to see hollow ads that we run under white listing pages. So I think just in case anyone wasn't sure how to look those up, that's like the quickest way to go, to go see those and kind of see pages that other other brands are using. Um, but yeah, I mean, like for us, we've put a lot of energy into this. know like probably Brad and I will go into this deeper in the episode of like picking white listing partners and like how to grade them, but I mean, one of the biggest unlocks for us in the last, I would say this year was putting a lot more energy into hiring what we call partners, which are individual influencers that we pay a flat monthly fee. We send them a unique brief and they shoot content for us and they don't post that content on their page. None of it is posted organically, but we only get that content to run for ads and we get white listing access to run ads with their handle. We've hired a few people in the like a hundred K to 200 K followers. And we've also, you know, now Zach Stuck (06:36.149) hired a few people into like 800K to a million plus followers. Those are the top performing ads in our account outside of like very direct response problem solution ads. So we actually had one ad that broke out that was a white listed ad in, I think it was February that ended up becoming 50 % of the one single ad that was white listed became 50 % of the ad spent in February for Holo, which is just mental. there's definitely a good opportunity here, but. Andrew Foxwell (06:58.5) Yeah. Zach Stuck (07:02.003) you know, as I'm sure we'll get into more, it's not just like one and done. It's not like the first one is going to be perfect. but yeah, that's that's been the biggest unlock for us. Andrew Foxwell (07:07.771) Yeah. So let's just back up for one second. you're going through this, and you're finding these folks. How are you determining which ones are going to be good? How do you even begin to search that? Because the other thing that's interesting is just from a baseline, it's clear that the strategic moves that Meta is making, obviously predominantly most of us are spending on Meta. That's the biggest channel. these ads and partnership ads and like white listing ads are really the an angle that they want everybody to be pushing on. So and algorithmically, I think they're favored. So I think that does help one just from a baseline. But as you start to go through this and start to find folks like how do mean, how do you even start to search for Zach Stuck (07:54.069) Sure, to calculate that, totally. I mean, think there's two things to break down. One is how to search for them. Two is like how we grade them, judge them and how much we're willing to spend on them. So the first is like how we find them. These are the initial ones were people that were following the brands that just had a bunch of followers that were like, hey, wow, there's like this individual that's like super into our brand that potentially even bought from us, which one of the individuals that we ended up hiring did. and had bought from us that has like 800,000 followers on Instagram and like a million plus on YouTube. And we just reached out to them through DMs because it like went straight through and just said, hey, we'd love an opportunity to like talk to you about a partnership. We see you don't do these with anyone else. Would you be open to it? That led to an email thread, which then led to me meeting this individual and having like a couple of conversations, telling about the brand, what we're doing, what we're up to. The biggest expectation, I think, that a lot of these people especially if they're going to be a bigger influencer that they like this for a reason is that they don't have to post the content on their page organically. No one wants to shill stuff. Like if you're a genuine creator and you feel like you have a genuine following, the last thing you want to be seen as is just someone that just like shills crap through your page to your followers. They want it to be something that they like genuinely use, like, enjoy. And so we had a couple of people like this that we've reached out to through DMs that were following us and then others that we just would reach out to through DMs that we aspired to work. Right. and that led to that, that kind of sequence. It's like a couple of emails that leads to a phone call. And then now, because this has become such a big part of our business, we have had a partnerships who handles all of that interaction versus me being the one that like talks directly to the creator. But, does, that all make sense? I can break down like the judgment. Do you any questions about that? Or was that clear? Brad (09:41.782) Makes sense to me. I have a couple of maybe rapid fire questions that are slightly related. So unless you want to go into how you're judging first. Zach Stuck (09:46.941) Yeah, yeah. No, let's talk about finding them because I think the finding them part is an important piece because I think a lot of people are like, I don't know how to do it. I to hire a full time person. Like there's just a lot there. Brad (09:57.413) Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So one step before that, it's like, so we laid out the options, which are like, you can run from a brand page, you can run from the creator page, whatever. My question before we dig into running it from the, guess, getting creator partnerships in general is like, have you noticed, is there a meaningful difference? Like, well, I guess your opinion is like, is it the content? Is it the whitelist thing? Is it both? kind of what we started with. I'm really curious about that. And like, are you running it across the... their page, the hollow page and like a third unaffiliated page kind of like I started with. Zach Stuck (10:31.637) Yeah, so it's the combination of all of it from my perspective. So it's, okay, you see an ad from someone and you're like, oh, maybe I recognize them from YouTube. I recognize them from Instagram reel or a TikTok reel that I saw because they're just like someone of influence, right? So this is like the higher tier influencer people. That definitely carries weight, right? Cause they're like, I've seen this person before. They click through to the profile and this person has even a hundred thousand followers. like, oh, and they are talking about like they have a themed page that maybe they're into, I don't know, golfing they're into. you know, hunting, they're into hiking, they're into running, they're into cycling, whatever their hobbies, they're into cooking, whatever it ends up being. If they have that theme page, it's like, this is a person that knows what they're talking about. Go back to the ad, watch the ad again. Like we feel like we've, we've seen longer watch times with these white listed ads than we see with like our direct response, more problem solution video ads. and to me, that's because they're like going to the page, coming back, wanting to see what they have to say. so I'd say it's the combination and then the creative is important. We've found that these ads usually. will get more scale with the white listing handle than they will with the brand page. So this is where the true secret sauce is kind of the combination of all three. The brand page carries some weight because it has some type of value to the consumer of even if it's the best gifts page, that's going to carry a little bit of extra weight versus just a brand that they don't even know who that is. So I think that is the creative. And then the combination of all three elements is kind of what gets the sale. What was the second thing that you asked? Brad (12:01.71) I don't remember, but I have a follow-up thing. So I've seen the same thing. I think you said something really important there, which was it can add volume to existing ads because kind of what Andrew said at the very beginning is it kind of adds some diversity to it. I think that's a super interesting point. We don't always see it become the top spending thing, but if it adds an additional 20 % in volume, cool, sick, we're pumped about that. And then one more follow-up before we go back into the grading thing. Zach Stuck (12:03.829) Okay. Brad (12:31.474) If somebody wanted to start this tomorrow, like the simplest version is you can go make a page that's just whatever, right? And then you can go get maybe like, you know, work with like some content creators and ask if they're they're interested in it. And then you start to get towards what you're saying is which is, okay, we can find somebody who's who's actually notable fits the demo in the space already talks about this stuff. And those are those are the free to expensive options and they all work in some degree. So okay. Zach Stuck (12:36.309) Create a page. Yeah, create a page, for sure. Zach Stuck (12:45.973) Totally. Yep. Zach Stuck (12:56.201) Mm hmm. Yeah. I think I jumped to like the final stage to get to once you're proving that this is working, which thank you, Brad, for really me back. Yeah. I mean, like whitelisting Kim K would be absolutely electric. So, I mean, she might, bringing this back though, to like how we've done it. So the first page that we ran was Zach from hollow. Like you can go look it up. There's like a couple of active ads underneath it. It gets a lot of spent like that works. Brad (13:04.641) Final stage is Kim Kardashian. Brad (13:10.798) She might wear socks. Zach Stuck (13:21.939) Then it was hiring, yeah, a creator that I think we paid $1,000 to for content that we briefed to them that they shot uniquely for us. They didn't have to post on their page. They had like 30,000 followers. like an outdoor enthusiast person with whitelisting access. And it was like, this is kind of working. And then we started to say, how much of our budget of creative that we spend on like going sourcing creative do we actually want to spend on what we call partnerships, which is like. these people that we will pay a flat fee per month plus white listing access that we can get content, not just like creators, which is like UGC creators. Those are people that we like hire that we just get the content from and run ads with, but we don't get white listing. So for our partner program, we basically said we're willing to spend 5 % of our ad spend on hiring these creators. And if that helps us grow our ad spend by an additional 50%, the math backs out. So like just to run very quick math, like I know we're not supposed to do like public math on this, like, Let's say you're spending $500,000 a month. If you're not running whitelisting, you're spending $500,000 a month, you have a lot more to unlock by doing this. Even if you're spending a quarter million a month, like there is a lot of unlocks to be had here. So we said 500K, we were spending around that kind of coming out of like Q4, like 5%. So we can go spend $25,000 hiring somewhere between five and 10 partners a month, where then we will send them a brief, a unique brief to them. and then we will get whitelist next to their page. And our goal is basically to get them to spend, if their fee is 5 % of what we can spend, it backs out for us and that's a win. So like if that, each individual person we can spend 5K with, we wanna be able to spend a hundred grand with their ads and then that math actually backs out to us paying them for a flat fee. So I think like the biggest thing is setting the expectation of how much are you willing to spend on the creators and then what is the ideal outcome of creators. Because for us, we actually took that 25K budget and slashed it down to like half of that because we realized, hey, half of these people actually, we weren't able to spend through at the raw as targets that we set. So I think the biggest thing of starting is like saying, okay, what percent of my creative budget or percentage of ad spend am I willing to take a bet on to see if I can push up more and spend with this new style of creative? And then setting the expectation of what you want to minimum to be able to spend behind each creator. Zach Stuck (15:42.879) That's what we've done. That's worked really well for us. Now we're spending 50 grand a month on our partnerships program, which means that in theory, we should be able to spend a million dollars a month behind these partners. That is like the math that has to back out for us. Andrew Foxwell (15:57.659) pretty interesting. let's go through, one thing I want to talk about briefly is getting, once you've connected with them, since we down that road, one thing that's made it really easy on our end is using LeadD to get connected with these people. Obviously, some of these folks aren't tech savvy. It's like a one-click solution, right? They just open the link, log in, confirm access. Makes it a lot easier for them. Hopefully, you guys are using that too. If you're not, it's worth calling out, I think. Zach Stuck (16:26.549) Yeah, I mean Andrew Foxwell (16:26.916) Just because that's like a huge pain in the ass once we've gone through the grading and finding like you're talking about. Zach Stuck (16:32.531) Yeah, mean Andrew, like introduced us to that and it's like a no brainer versus like back and forth emails. You're talking sometimes with assistants for these people to like just garner access to the business account, all that stuff. So yeah, no brainer. Brad (16:43.662) Yeah. And on top of that, you want to have, and this is probably part of the agreement Zach, but like you want to be able to not just run the individual, right? I guess if they're posting to the page, but like, you don't want to get stuck only being able to run that one post with the copy that they wrote. You want to have some flexibility of, need to change the hook and things like that. So like actually getting proper access makes it a lot easier as opposed to every single time you need to make a change, going back and asking them to do that. Zach Stuck (17:07.177) Yep. Yep. Yeah. mean, I think the most interesting stage like to take this, I'm just going to take it one step deeper, which we've just started to do is, okay, let's say you find a partner and you're like, my gosh, we can spend a ton of money behind their ads and their content with their handle. Put them on a performance plan that makes them want to go shoot you more content. So we've done this now with a handful of people. have someone, and I won't disclose who it is that we pay like 12 grand a month to. It sounds crazy. You're like, how are you paying this creator 12 grand a month? We pay him 12 grand a month. because this individual is on a 5 % of ad spend bonus. So if we break through ad spend of like a quarter million dollars a month behind their ads, they start making 5 % of what we spend behind it. And with that, this individual is now shooting content for us throughout the entire month. We send them briefs, they shoot their own content, they want us to spend more money, and they're basically feeding us with just content because they're like, hey, I want you to spend more behind my ads. That is like... next level stuff. Once you get to this point and you're like, I can spend a bunch of money and I can scale up to that point. I would definitely recommend you taking bets with some of these creators and saying, hey, here's a performance bonus. If your ads can spend so much a month, that's a huge win for our business. And we're willing to show you a couple extra grand. Andrew Foxwell (18:20.153) I mean, and that's such a good creative way to start to think about these agreements. I think that these folks are inclined, lot of these people, certainly in the creators that we have in the Fox founders community, those that I've with and what I've heard from other members too is like, the more that you can align incentives, the better off it's gonna be for everyone. And you wanna try to get in with these people that like, if it feels good on step one, then like, where they're sending you stuff, and it feels natural and you're like what they're doing, then ultimately incentivizing them and aligning it moving forward is gonna be huge. They're shooting content anyway, so why not make you their main person? I heard somebody say on an agency owner's call the other day that they said to, they have a similar setup with one of their biggest creators, and they said, who's doing content across their... portfolio brands essentially and said to them like we want to be paying you three times as much so here's what needs to happen to do that and like apparently that was like beginning of the year and now that's almost happened which is pretty cool right like everybody loves to be incentivized that way so on the grading thing like once you go through you've looked you you've found some of these folks how are you how are you grading them Brad how do you guys grade them and then we'll let Zach kind of go through Brad (19:43.704) Yeah, no, mean, I think Zach kind of nailed it with like the way that he lays out the percentage of spend is similar to how we look at it. I think the simple math just backs out is you have to determine, you do your break even row as calculation, you figure out how much you need to spend in order to make up for what you paid them on a fixed fee. And anything above that is like gravy, unless you start to introduce these performance based incentives for us. And transparently, like, I want to do more of this, which is why I love this conversation, because I'm stealing Zach's insights. Like, I think we could do more. Like the low end kind of where we are is we're creating, we're building out these like non-branded pages and we're working with, like we're seeding kind of like content creators as opposed to maybe these like bigger personalities. And so what we do is, yeah, we just basically, we go and we seed content. If the content hits even decently well inside of the ad account, then we'll go back and ask for whitelisting and see what that does for volume. But basically for... for us because we're sourcing it, the calculation is a little bit different than how you do it for the brand. But from the brand side, it's, yeah, just making sure that it covers the cost of the content. Andrew Foxwell (20:48.571) How much are you guys, Zach, how much do you guys seed product with folks that you wanna partner with? Or is it mostly that you're big enough that you're, was this an early around thing that you did and then now you don't have to do this as much? Yeah. Zach Stuck (21:00.019) We tried it. We tried seeding products, but the issue with seeding, so this is like my gripe and sorry to anyone that does seeding stuff. Like a lot of the way that that works best and it's just our brand more specifically, they're younger female creators. Younger female creators are more willing to get seeded product for free and then shoot content for free and then post it. Then our core demo, which is like 40 plus men, right? So for us, we tried it and all the people that were willing to accept and shoot content for free were just like younger female creators. Now, if that is your customer and like those ads work for your customer base all day, go for seating first, cause it's a cheaper route. It just didn't work for us because like our demo isn't that demo that was willing to do it. Getting 40 plus men to shoot content, like you have to usually pay them and they're usually some type of like outdoor influencer before they're willing to do it. So for us, it didn't work. Now I've seen it work for other brands. Like we, Andrew Foxwell (21:49.413) Mm-hmm. Zach Stuck (21:54.677) You know, Hex Cloud has been the client of Homestead for a very long time. They ran a seating program. I think they still do now and it works great. So the benefit that they have though is that their product suite that they're giving out is hundreds of dollars versus maybe like a $30, you know, a beauty product or something like that. So I think it depends on the category. I think it depends on the creators that are willing to do it for just seating for free. But we never really saw this success there, which is kind of why we had to step it up to like I would call mid-grade creators, which is about a thousand hours a month. have, you know, 10 to 150,000 followers. We saw some traction there and then we're like, okay, let's take a shot at a bigger creator, which we've had one really go really, really well and one kind of not hit. So I think the kind of sweet spot is like the partnerships that you can spend somewhere between two grand and five grand a month on. And those are individuals that you can spend hopefully a hundred K plus behind their ads. That is like kind of the sweet spot from what we found. because it's really hard to get individuals that you can spend more than that behind each person, unless you have a really breakout ad. Like we got lucky and had one that hit in like February, but that's pretty rare. Andrew Foxwell (23:03.515) Well, you can do product seeding maybe when you launch your collagen sock line. Like I feel like that's like collagen enhancing GLP-1 socks. Yeah, it's a big angle. So Brad, when you go through and you're doing the whitelisting, you have it set up. One of the things I feel like that you taught me is naming conventions within meta to like track this more efficiently. How do you guys do that? How do you name them properly? Zach Stuck (23:07.509) Yeah, collagen socks. yeah, for sure. Yeah, the GLP1 socks is a great idea. Brad (23:31.724) Yeah, pretty simple when it comes to whitelisting. So we try to always include the creator name at least in the ad, even if it's non-whitelisted. And then if it's whitelisted, you just throw the WL in the naming convention, WL underscore in the creator's name, and that kind of simplifies it. Where it's getting a little bit more complex recently is if we're running it from the brand page versus the not-affiliated page versus the creator page. but still pretty easy. just include the handle of the actual page that it's running from. Similar sidebar quick. I saw that Meta introduced the ability to let them decide if it shows the brand first or the creator first or just shows the creator or just shows the brand. think Dave Recoq tweeted, I feel like Dave's name comes up every time we have these podcasts. And Taylor Halliday responded and was like, this is Meta saying we are going to do what's better. Just give us the control and get out of the way, which is hilarious because I think he's totally right. Andrew Foxwell (24:16.154) Yeah. Andrew Foxwell (24:26.071) Yeah, right. You're not gonna have a choice in like six months. Yeah. Brad (24:28.928) Exactly. Exactly. It's the just trust the black box. And I do I do. But yeah, just throw it in throw it in the naming conventions, throw the creator name, notify what what page is actually coming from, and then allow you to pull those reports. Zach Stuck (24:41.173) Yeah, I mean, I think just to like really nail down on the like simplest form here, if you run any founder style content, which I think most brands should try to do, or at least like your own UGC version that your team shoots, that's like an employee of I thought I saw that on like Twitter was like, not whatever founder content, but employee content, whatever. Create a page around that. Create a page around the founders name. Create a page around like, whatever. John from brand XYZ, whatever. Those pages are always and historically the top performing one, even beyond any other type of like, like white listing partner that we've seen for all of our brands in our portfolio and from, you know, some, some clients of ours at, at Homestead. The founder page. Brad (25:25.91) Is this you leaking? This is you telling us you're the 12K a month creator for... Okay. Zach Stuck (25:29.883) Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Besides Zach from Hollow, that is the number one that's been holding for a while. Yeah, good text. Andrew Foxwell (25:33.241) Good tax incentive, yeah. Brad (25:37.954) Yeah, that's a great point. Cause like that's the easiest one is if you're willing to get on camera, which you should be right. Like that's the first one. And then the second one is an unaffiliated page of like pick your top demo, throw it in a chat, throw your top demo, name your brand in a chat, and say, I'm creating a Facebook page. Give me 10 options and then just go pick a couple. Zach Stuck (25:40.691) Easiest one. Zach Stuck (25:55.507) Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, that is that is the no brainer. If you want the lowest cost quickest way to like give us a shot. That's that's the way. Andrew Foxwell (26:03.525) So if you're going, so we've gone through kind of payment and like how we structure a lot of these agreements. Do you guys have contracts with them typically? then also, is the best, we talked about obviously doing incentive based pricing structure or payment structure rather. But do you, think out of the gates, most of the time it's like a fixed one time payment when you're starting to work with these people and then it shifts into something else. But have you seen another payment method that seems to work? Zach Stuck (26:13.098) Yeah. Zach Stuck (26:32.757) So the sweet spot that we found is a 60 day contracts. It's basically the first 30 days to like get access, send them products, write a custom brief for them, send them the brief, they shoot the content and then in the next 30 days you run the ad and you pay them a one-time fee for that 60 day period. think people think that they can do this like really fast, but some of these people, if you, especially if you go push up to like bigger creators, they're traveling in the world, they're doing all sorts of stuff. They've got events, they've got whatever like. Andrew Foxwell (26:57.518) Right. Zach Stuck (26:59.281) It is a couple of grand, which they will appreciate, but it's not like life changing amount of money. So give them time, like expect that this will take some time to get the content. So we basically plan 30 days for that 30 days to actually run the content. And then we judge it at the end of that 30 days. And it's like, okay, were we able to spend, you know, 20 times what we pay this creator and that's 5 % of spend versus what their fee was. And if that backs out, cool, renew them again. And we'll do a three month contract with them. That's how we do it. And yeah, we have contracts for it for what it's worth. Brad (27:30.494) Yeah, have nothing to add useful there. Andrew Foxwell (27:31.835) No, no, no worries. Zach Stuck (27:32.981) Yeah. the one thing that I feel like is like, everyone is like, man, I have to go hire my law firm to go put the Taylor's contract. Like I think one thing that we could do Andrew is like for the, for the founder members is I could drop the contract that we use that we've already paid someone to do. And you could post that in there. So anyone that's a founder member will like add that extra little value add for you. save you a couple of grand versus hiring a attorney to like write up this contract. Andrew Foxwell (27:57.499) Beauty, appreciate that. Don't tell the attorney. Okay, so we're measuring, so are there any other, are there metrics that you judge these by outside of different, that are different than the metrics that you use normally? Like hook rate, hold rate, CPC, CVR, creative type, branded, non-branded, et cetera. What are, are there, are we measuring it the same that we're measuring other pieces? We're measuring it the same. So I'm asking you guys, like we don't necessarily look this any different. Zach Stuck (28:01.104) Thank Brad (28:25.388) Yeah. Yeah, we're mostly measuring it the same, like looking at whatever our ROAS or CAC or a both combination target is on seven day click is kind of how we're doing it. I do think an interesting point, like I think literally just yesterday, Dara Denny just did a video with some folks from Seed and they said something really interesting towards the end of the video, which was talking about their incrementality of whitelisting not being any different than the incrementality of their branded content. I would bet a lot of money that that's not true for all brands. like there's probably an argument to be made that there are different incrementality factors. And I that's like a huge word this year and last. although we are measuring primarily based on some kind of version of like seven day click efficiency, I'd imagine that there are different types of incrementality, which might also vary across creators for us too, which is crazy. Yeah. Zach Stuck (29:16.149) Thanks. Yeah, creators, brands, think the AOV, mean, like there's so many, I mean, they're pushing for subscription. Like there's a lot of other variables out there. Yeah. Otherwise no notes from what Brad said. We're looking at ad spend as like ad spend and as it is like our number one KPI lately. I think that this is like something that we can talk about in another episode, but if you're running growth and you're running the ad account, you shouldn't be spending unless it's hitting goal. Andrew Foxwell (29:21.339) Absolutely. Absolutely. Zach Stuck (29:45.075) So if it has the most spend, if you're looking at spend as like your threshold, that is actually probably the biggest thing for when you're reviewing these. Did they spend the most money? And if they spent enough money, then it backs up. spend, obviously ROAS has to be there to spend more, CPA has to be there to spend more. So that's how we think about Andrew Foxwell (30:02.171) Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think sometimes within this world, within our world, there's always these confusing metrics and shit that comes up that people use to confuse other people. I don't know if you've heard of my trademark method. called the I-velocity. It's influent. No, I'm just kidding. I don't have that. It's not true. Okay, so let's talk about some more advanced applications of this. I know that you, have done deployed white listed landers with crater first landing pages. So you're sort of matching them. Tell us about that. That's pretty cool tactic that for sure people should steal. Zach Stuck (30:41.981) Yeah, I mean, we've done this now across our brands and Homestead clients a few times. But if you are hiring one these bigger creators that people will recognize, it's worth testing. Basically taking the main landing page or product page that you're about to push people to, duplicate it over and change the hero to be a content section around that creator. So like for us, you know, we take like our these these big creators and we like punch them in, add a custom testimonial from them, a custom headline that relates to them, something that they've said, whatever. And some of these pages have like, you know, a little extra, you know, you can give them a little extra gas and they'd have a little more volume, but I think it's worth trying because it hasn't worked for every single brand. But like one, I mean, like again, I'll just like reference X-File because I said them earlier, but like we would run ads with like Gordon or like landing pages with Gordon in it. It's like, okay, like the ads Gordon, the landing pages Gordon, it crushes. we, know, if the influencer, Jeff Gordon, correct. Yeah. Race car driver. Yep. Andrew Foxwell (31:35.195) You're talking about Jeff Gordon, Like the race car, the race car. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, right. Big, big guys, yeah. Zach Stuck (31:39.797) big NASCAR fans over here at scalability school. But that's where sometimes these creators aren't as recognizable and then that doesn't carry any weight. So we've kind of learned that if they're a bigger personality, it can work well, but if not, doesn't do that much. Brad (31:59.342) I have two unrelated, potentially unrelated things. when you go back to like, just to step back for a second, like finding the people, like how are you actually finding those? Cause like it's easy to go to a content platform and like they're already kind of set up on there. Is that what you guys are primarily doing or are doing it like literally scrolling through Instagram, finding people in the demo and then going that route. Andrew Foxwell (32:00.091) All right. Zach Stuck (32:21.235) Yeah, I we're just looking for like, sorry, go for Andrew. We just look for cool people that we've like represent the brand to be honest, like people that all follow, people that our team members follow and we're like, hey, we could use this person for, you know, maybe a running partner. We could use this person for like a, someone just makes cool shit on the internet. It's like, okay, let's go hire them. And then we're just trying to build relationships with them. A lot of it comes down if they're a bigger creator is like building a relationship. Andrew Foxwell (32:21.941) in No, you can go ahead. Zach Stuck (32:47.541) If they are a call it like mid tier creator that 10 K to a hundred thousand followers, there's definitely platforms that you can use. I'm sure Brad, you probably use some of them, maybe even have some to recommend, but, um, and our team has a couple of times, I can't think of them off the top of my head. Um, but most of these people are that we're hiring in the 10 to even a hundred are followers of ours or customers of ours that we like look up. Um, and we're like, okay, well they've either followed us or bought something from us. Let's go reach out to them and see if they're interested in making content. Brad (33:14.082) Yeah, I wish there was a platform and maybe there is. I've tried to use one of the passwords. Like you upload your customer database and it connects you with their Instagram profile and you like, no, obviously you can scroll through who follows you and you can look for the check marks, but now you can pay for check marks. So it's kind of, kind of gets lost in the sauce a little bit. Zach Stuck (33:26.419) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's we, there was one that existed for a minute and I, haven't, I don't, can't remember what it's called. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a Shopify app that could do it, but I don't think it exists anymore. Andrew Foxwell (33:31.789) And then like something around the terms of service, you know, yeah. Andrew Foxwell (33:40.091) Yeah, a lot of folks we have, do this obviously in the Foxwell Founders community, they'll reach out to Mariah and she'll connect them, who's our creator matchmaker with different creators. And that's like a great way to get started for a lot of folks. And we actually are launching pretty soon here, the Foxwell Creator Community, which is for creators to help them build their own businesses, but also brands who are founder members get to come in for $0 and get to post and have people say, yeah, I'd like to take you up on that. We're trying to kind of build a more white glove service around that. Cause a lot of these are like, you're going to go searching and you know, it's like, you can look at engagement rates and all this, but around those influencers, it doesn't feel right. Which is why Zach, I feel the way that you guys are doing it makes the most sense to me, right? It's like, who, who is cool? Like who, who are we at? Who actually does this feel right with? Which I think, you know, knowing the vibe of your brand, like that, that is actually really important. Zach Stuck (34:27.103) Yeah. Andrew Foxwell (34:34.811) because those are gonna be the most successful because then you can speak to the content they've created previously, right? Which is like sets it on a completely different tone out of the gates. Zach Stuck (34:44.373) Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of brands that say, there's no one though that like is an influencer in our category. I had a conversation with like a brand owner that's in pet supplements. I'm like, there's a bunch of, you know, like influencers that love their dog that talk about their dog that talk about products for them. Like there's a bunch of options. There's, you know, veterinarians, there's all sorts of people out there. I think, think question that if you're thinking, hey, there's no creator out there for me. Like think about who your customers could be or people like your customers. Like there's definitely influencers out there that you could go. Brad (35:14.606) White listing from the dog page also works. Just throw it in there. Zach Stuck (35:17.459) Yeah, mean, Rufus from whatever sounds like it would rip, might as well send it. Andrew Foxwell (35:18.053) Yeah. Andrew Foxwell (35:22.649) Yeah. Gentlemen, anything else to add? Brad (35:29.912) I don't know, I think that's a lot. had something but it's escaping me, so probably not. Zach Stuck (35:30.165) Yeah. Zach Stuck (35:34.247) Yeah, I mean, think the last thing is just like to do this, start with the basics. Don't try to send it right away. Don't go spend $12,000 like we are at Holo on your first creator. It's probably not going to work. Like start at the beginning, make up a page, whatever. Brad from X brand, right? Like start there. Start with the founder one ideally if you're having founder content. Try that first. See if there's any incremental. And like the nice thing about that is you can just run your same ads under a different page. Try that first. If you see some lift and rise, great. Then that's where you can invest in your first thousand dollar crater to get white listing access and then start to punch it up. I just think it's like, it can be very overwhelming. It's like, this is a whole new thing in the business. Do we need to hire ahead of partnerships? No, you can definitely start basic and give it a shot and kind of work your way up. So that's just the last piece that I have. Andrew Foxwell (36:21.061) Very cool. Thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed this, please rate us and email me, andrewatfoxwoodigital.com if you have any feedback. Otherwise, gentlemen, we'll look forward to next time and thank you for listening to the episode six of Scalability School. Brad (36:36.878) See ya.